A man who watched the family being kicked out of the hostel told Sweden’s biggest newspaper, Aftonbladet, that the police tried to calm down the situation while the Chinese family just “shouted and screamed.” The son’s behavior was particularly strange, suddenly just “throwing himself flat on the ground,” according to the InBeijing blog run by the Swedish journalist Jojje Olsson.

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These melodramatic scenes might seem ripe for satirizing. That’s exactly what the people at Swedish News, a comedy show on SVT, Sweden’s national public TV broadcaster, did. Swedish News features a satirical news segment, much like the “Weekend Update” segment on “Saturday Night Live.”

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In it, presenter Jesper Ronndahl delivered a 10-minute-long segment about the whole debacle that was apparently meant to be funny. It ended with a spoof video that the Swedish News team made and said they uploaded onto Youku, the Chinese version of YouTube. (We checked Youku and the video is not there — it’s not clear whether it was ever uploaded, or if Youku took it down.)

The spoof video opens with a woman saying, “Here are a few tips to avoid cultural clashes.”

“For example, we do not poop outside historic buildings. And if you see someone who’s out walking a dog, it’s not because they just bought lunch,” she continued, alluding to the cliche that Asians regularly eat dogs and to old reports that Chinese tourists had defecated outside the Louvre museum in Paris. This part of the report was illustrated with a sign of a person in a Chinese-style hat squatting and pooping while eating out of a bowl with chopsticks.

Then, in what was probably meant to be another attempt at humor, she went on: “Another important cultural difference is that you Chinese are racists. And here in Sweden, there are black people, Jews, Arabs and even homosexuals.”

Well, this rubbed salt into the wound. China’s Foreign Ministry in Beijing and its embassy in Stockholm decried the segment as a show of racism and demanded an apology....